For a brief moment it was difficult for Newton to find the words, any word, to respond. ‘Don’t you think that might be difficult, in the circumstances?’
‘Tell public affairs full co-operation, with every media outlet. Maybe you head up a press conference. After all, we’ve got nothing whatsoever to hide. Remember that.’
‘Nothing whatsoever,’ echoed Newton, flatly. The water had to be almost up to his chin now. He wasn’t sure whether he wanted to strain upwards to save himself or put his head down, to drown.
‘What do we know about Rebecca Lang? Family, friends, stuff like that?’ briskly demanded Grant.
Now it was Newton who frowned. ‘She and Parnell were going to get married, according to the papers and what he said on television. Her mother and father are both dead. Next of kin is listed on the personnel records as an uncle. Lives locally, in the DC area.’
‘Get personnel involved. Wayne Denny himself. Dubette will pick up all the bills. Whatever sort of funeral they want, they get. Reception afterwards, their choice, whatever, wherever. You attend. Showcross too, of course. Anyone else in the unit who wants to go.’
‘I understand.’ Oh God, do I understand! thought Newton.
‘Tell Parnell to take as much time off as he wants. Get Denny, anyone else you can think of, involved here, too.’
‘OK.’
‘How about you, Dwight?’
‘Me?’
‘What’s happened is horrifying. A member of Dubette staff – your staff-murdered. An attempt made, apparently, to incriminate a department head. Understandable that it would have gotten to you. It’s gotten to a lot of us, one way and another.’
‘I’m OK,’ lied Newton. He was anxious now to get away, no longer to feel he was drowning, to be part of whatever he feared himself to be part of.
‘That’s good to hear,’ said Grant. ‘Very good indeed.’ He came forward once more across their intervening table, arms on his knees, intense. ‘I want you to tell me something, Dwight. Something it’s very important for me to know – totally and completely believe. You don’t think – don’t believe – that anyone in Dubette is in any way involved or connected with whatever happened to Rebecca and almost happened to Dick Parnell, do you?’
‘No,’ Newton finally surrendered, as he’d known all along that he would, the nausea a physical sensation deep in his stomach. ‘I don’t think that at all.’ What would have happened to him, he wondered, if he’d said anything otherwise?
No one seemed to know how to react to his return. Parnell had accepted during the ride to McLean that he would inevitably be the focus of everyone’s attention, from the very moment of his arrival at the Dubette gatehouse, but hadn’t known how it would register. It started with uncertain looks – or pointedly no looks in his direction at all – from other drivers as he parked the rented Toyota only four spaces from where he’d left his own car three days earlier. There were more hesitant, early-warned faces at the windows and, as he got closer to the building, he was conscious of a lot of doubtful, needing-to-be-guided faces. Very occasionally there was a half wave or gesture of encouragement from people he didn’t know. In front of the elevator bank, three people – a man and two women – held back for him to get a car to himself. There were more half smiles and a few inconclusive gestures as he walked the gauntlet of the overlooked corridor into the Spider’s Web.
Initially the indeterminate attitude existed even in his own pharmacogenomics department, where everyone was already assembled in greeting, which they didn’t know how to make once he got there. It was Beverley Jackson who broke the impasse, coming towards him with both hands outstretched to prompt his reaching forward in response, leading the rest to follow with awkward handshakes and shoulder slaps.
‘We don’t quite know what to say – what to do,’ Beverley unnecessarily admitted.
‘I don’t know that there’s anything to say or do,’ said Parnell. ‘I seem to be causing some embarrassment.’
‘Whatever you want… need… just…’ Ted Lapidus’s offer trailed away, into more awkwardness.
‘I think I want to get back to work. Catch up on whatever needs to be caught up with.’
‘You quite sure you’re…?’ started Sean Sato, halted by the look on Parnell’s face.
Parnell said: ‘We just got a new unbreakable rule for the department. No one asks me if I’m OK, OK?’
Only Deke Pulbrow said: ‘OK,’ and then he said: ‘Oh shit!’
The Japanese American said: ‘I’m sorry. It’s just that… just that …’
‘Just that there’s nothing else to do or to say,’ Parnell finished for him. He allowed space into the discomfort, hoping to puncture it. ‘Thanks, all of you. To borrow Deke’s word, it’s been a shit time and will probably go on being a shit time for I don’t know how long. Whatever, I want things to go on here, without me if it’s necessary, with me, if and whenever it’s possible…’ He looked to Kathy Richardson. ‘Anything I need to do, need to know?’
‘A lot of media calls yesterday and already today. I’ve logged them.’
His newly installed answering-machine loop at Washington Circle had been exhausted by the time he’d got back from Georgetown the previous evening. Parnell hadn’t responded to any and let the tape fill up again without picking up the receiver. He shook his head in refusal and said: ‘Nothing else?’
The matronly secretary looked fleetingly at Beverley Jackson. ‘Your lawyer called. Said he was at the office number you have and would be, for most of the day, if you want to talk.’
‘Anything from Dwight’s office?’
The woman shook her head. ‘You want me to check?’
‘He’s not due back until this afternoon,’ accepted Parnell. ‘Just thought his schedule might have changed.’ He looked around the people still gathered around him, knowing they were expecting something from him but not able, at that precise, brief moment, to formulate anything in his mind. It was going to be difficult to force the pace, the dispassion even, but Parnell acknowledged that he had to evolve a way of conducting himself to make happen what he wanted to happen, for his life to go on at two separate, equally important levels, as unlinked and independent of each other as possible. Were the two levels equally important? Of course not. Finding Rebecca’s killer – who’d tried to incriminate him, as well – was the most important, his absolute priority. The department – this department – that had once, all too recently and far far too much, consumed him and his every thought was secondary now – very secondary indeed – to avenging Rebecca. Forcing himself to be still – certainly striving for a lightness that wasn’t there – Parnell said: ‘So, who’s made the breakthrough that’s going to make us all famous?’
The heads-lowered hesitation was the criticism he didn’t need of how wrongly placed the remark had been. It was Beverley who hurried in, trying to cover his difficulty, talking of three experiments she’d conducted upon mice with Dubette’s products without finding an immediate way of introducing a genetically linked improvement, which gradually opened the discussion among the others. It quickly became apparent to Parnell that virtually no experimental avenues had emerged to follow, which he hadn’t expected anyway, but it took away the atmosphere caused by his mistaken remark and he was grateful.
It was hard for him to concentrate as fully as he knew he should upon their individual accounts, but he managed sufficiently to ask the necessarily comprehending questions. More than once Ted Lapidus remarked that everything Parnell was being told had been fully discussed and agreed in the committee-style manner in which they had decided to operate.
Sean Sato was the last to contribute and almost from the moment the man began talking, Parnell’s attention became absolute. ‘Avian influenza?’ he queried, interrupting the man. ‘I thought you were focusing on Hepatitis C?’
‘We got a visit from Russell Benn, soon after you…’ Lapidus halted. ‘… on Monday. Tokyo’s heading up a project decided on by the company, the species-jumping of flu from fowls and wild animals to humans that causes epidemics that start in Asia virtually every year. The World Health Organization are warning that if a human being already suffering influenza becomes infected with bird flu, the two viruses could integrate and mutate into an unknown – and currently untreatable – strain transmitting from human to human very easily, to become a global pandemic like the one that killed more than twenty million people after the First World War.’
‘What direction is the project taking?’ asked Parnell. He wasn’t letting his mind drift now – properly, committedly, back at work. It felt good.
‘A vaccine,’ said Sato.
‘For humans? Or birds?’ asked Parnell.
‘Both, if possible,’ said Lapidus.
